More meditations from a sheep

Of course, being a sheep is exactly what Jesus asked the people of first-century Palestine to be. "Turn the other cheek, do not resist an evildoer, do good to those who mistreat you." Etc.

But those were not moral platitudes delivered into a political void. Palestine (or Judea, as it was then known) was an occupied territory, brutally conquered and kept subject by an oppressive, violently exploitative, and very effective empire. The more you learn about Roman rule at the time, the harder it becomes to resist the idea that violent rebellion might just have been justified. 

But Jesus asked them to do the opposite, to refuse to answer violence and injustice with more of the same. (In fact, more than that, he asked them to respond with love).

Why did he do this?

I think that, first of all (and for brevity's sake it will be the only point for today), he knew that violence was an ineffective form of resistance.

History proves this pretty definitively. Jewish zealots in Palestine did rebel violently and in large numbers on three separate occasions (4 BCE at the death of Herod the Great, 66-73 CE resulting in the destruction of the Temple, 132-135 CE leading to the expulsion of the surviving Jews from Jerusalem and Judea).

So they were slaughtered every time. With the weight of the state and a huge empire on their side, the Romans had all the power, resources, people, and weapons.

(Incidentally, John Dominic Crossan points out — in God and Empire, a book I highly recommend — that the centre of the Judean rebellions in 4 BCE was the city of Sepphoris, which is only 4 miles from Jesus' hometown of Nazareth. With Jesus' birth  also generally dated around 4 BCE, he probably would have grown up hearing about the rebellion and resulting massacres.)

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And of course, though the situation was much less dramatic and life-or-death, the same proved to be true of the Toronto G8/G20 protests.

Being violent played perfectly into the hands of the authorities. For many mesmerized by media images of shops smashed and cars burned, the violence of a few black bloc protesters justified the billion-dollar security operation that militarized Toronto's downtown — not to mention the brutalization of thousands of peaceful protesters.


Without the violence, there might have been a serious public discussion about why the government and its security forces felt a need to go so overboard. Instead, every broken window pane and every shot of masked protesters justified the expense, the paranoia, and the overbearing response of the security forces.

Or at least it did so in the minds of many — and far beyond those who you'd expect (e.g. conservative hawks). I've talked to a relative that marched in peace and anti-government demonstrations in the '60s who was mesmerized by television coverage of the protests, and subsequently felt the expense and actions of the security forces were entirely justified given 'what they were up against.'

(Nevermind that the security forces response was entirely disproportionate. Nevermind that the hooligans did relatively little damage — compared with, say, the costs businesses bore as a result of having the downtown militarized and effectively shut down. Nevermind that the media, through its fascination with the sensational and visually dramatic, magnified what were basically small and incidental moments.)